Context:

Every year India observes July 31 as Shaheed Udham Singh Martyrdom Day.

Udham Singh

• Udham Singh was born Sher Singh on December 26, 1899, in the Sunam city of Sangrur districts.
• After his father's death, he and his older brother were raised in a Central Khalsa orphanage in Amritsar. 
• Udham Singh joined the Ghadar movement in the early 1920s.
• Singh rose to prominence as a Ghadar activist in the US, establishing the Azad Party and broadening his network abroad.
• He met Bhagat Singh in prison after being arrested in 1927 for carrying a weapon and reading seditious literature.
• Udham Singh was a survivor of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. 
• He planned revenge against former Punjab lieutenant governor O’Dwyer and assassinated him in 1940.

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre:

• This incident happened on April 13, 1919, in which under O’Dwyer’s regime British Brigadier Reginald Dyer fired at a crowd of Indians in an open space known as the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing several hundred people and wounding many hundreds more.

Story of revenge

• As Michael O'Dwyer (then Lt. governor of Punjab) was giving a speech at Caxton Hall, Udham Singh shot him 5 times at point-blank range with a handgun hidden in the book.
  The massacre's mastermind, Reginald Dyer, had passed away in 1927.
• He was sentenced to death in the Central Criminal Court. He also went on a hunger strike while in jail. He hanged himself on July 31, 1940, in a London jail.

Udham Singh’s Legacy

• Singh’s one-room accommodation ancestral house in Sunam has been converted into a museum, now maintained by the archaeology department. 
• In 1974, Singh’s remains were exhumed in the UK and repatriated to India.
• In 2016, marking Udham Singh’s birthday, then Punjab Chief Minister laid the foundation stone of a memorial for Singh, it was built on four acres of land in Sunam. The memorial was inaugurated on October 31, 2021.
• Punjab and Haryana observe public holidays on the day of his execution.
• On the directive of the then-chief minister of undivided Uttar Pradesh, the Udham Singh Nagar district in Uttarakhand bears the name of Udham Singh.